“Taking a knee” stands for the specter of beefy, pampered athletes—they’re not sportsmen—wealthy beyond belief, striking a political pose on the football field, during the playing of the national anthem.

First to kneel when he was meant to stand was Colin Kaepernick. The reason the San Francisco 49er knelt, in 2016: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

Like Kaepernick, current kneelers are not Copernicus. It’s hard to fathom what they actually want. A non-player activist has since narrowed the kneeling to “ending the killing of black men and black women by the police.”

To question the debasing of the English language, in this context, is probably considered racist, but I’ll take one for Team English. At first, I knew not what on earth “take a knee” meant. Commentators and anchors discussed this god-awful expression without explaining it. And my connection to American football is as weak as the connection Americans have to one another.

I grew up on a sports diet of basketball and real football—the kind Pelé played without a dog muzzle and with dazzling footwork. South African rugby, too, was faster and more fun than American football. Nevertheless, I root for my home team, the Seattle Seahawks.

Why so? We all inhabit this busy mart called America, but are united by nothing meaningful at all. The football fetish in America has intensified in the context of a country whose inhabitants agree on little else than the importance of The Game. Consequently, come playoff time, we come together fleetingly and superficially, to make a religion out of our respective professional football teams.

“Take a knee” must have originated in some linguistic botching, a lazy collapsing of alliteratively related words and phrases. I mean, you can “kneel,” “kneel down,” or “get down on your knees.” You most certainly can “bow down” or “take a bow.” But, “Take a knee”? It sounds like an adaptation from “take a p-e.” Actually, I’m not far off. The Giants’ Odell Beckham Jr. “had been flagged … for unsportsmanlike conduct when he celebrated a touchdown by impersonating a dog urinating.” …

If we must segregate intellectuals, then Thomas Sowell is a thinker, as is Walter E. Williams. But not this man. Alas, Coates’ fortunes are not merit-based. Yes, how does the adulation Coates receives square with his accusations, made into a career calling, of our racism, yours and mine?

Hayes attempted diplomatically, 6:30 minutes in, to refute Coates’ put down of all whites who voted Trump, but Hayes backed down from being intellectually forceful. Besides, Coats was unable to respond to the host. Simply couldn’t.

As to “America’s founding sins,” as Coats calls slavery. I was not party to that, so I reject his collective guilt. We all should.

UPDATE I: On Gab, someone point out that, “African-American vernacular is a legitimate dialect of English, no different than southern or Australian or any other dialect. That doesn’t make it inferior.”

REPLY: This cultivated African-American dialect was, I believe, absent in the 1950s through the 1960s and even the 70s. It’s a racial, not regional, dialect, adopted, it would seem, artificially for political ends.

UPDATE II:DON on Gab: Having not been alive in those decades I can’t personally refute that (ridiculous, I mean come on) claim, but have a listen to this 1956 interview with a Black American and tell me it doesn’t sound quite a bit like blacks today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvEE9zdHpcY
REPLY: The most educated of blacks once sounded like educated Americans, not like the exotic exhibits you make them out to be. Do yo think people should strive to speak great English, the language of the founders & of the founding docs? Or bastardize the language to pidgin english? Leftists are with you.

Tucker Carlson and his guest Dan Bongino raised what you might call a look-away issue: Looting.

As the two looked on at footage of looters in post-Irma Florida, TV talker and guest volunteered that “this” was “not about race.” “This,” presumably, being a reference to the looting.

Here was one of those, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lyin’ eyes?” moments.

Messrs. Carlson and Bongino were watching an embarrassingly uniform group of outlaws in action. Mr. Carlson even went on to quip that the looting landscape comprised not mothers in search of diapers and infant formula, but people dressed to the nines in gold chains.

If the “gold-chains” allusion is not a proxy for race in our navel-gazing nation, what is?

What, then, is one to take away from these obfuscations coming as they do from our side? That looting can “strike” anyone? That anybody can “catch” looting from Florida’s contaminated flood waters? (Incidentally, wastewater infrastructure is buckling under, due in large part to unmanageable population growth. Immigration is stinking up Florida. Literally.)

Please don’t tell your viewers that flaws of character marring individuals in certain groups in significant numbers are a systemic, societal, structural problem. That argument is taken. It’s the case made by Cultural Marxism and its watered-down political offshoots of multiculturalism and political correctness.

In a manner of speaking, when conservatives hearken back to the “Democrats'” Welfare State to explain away the color of crime; they, too, are making the Cultural Marxist argument.

Recall how blacks rampaged through Milwaukee, hollering their white-hot hatred for whites? “He white. Beat his shit,” yelled one hoodlum in footage featured on “Hannity.” But crime, race and the reality of such racial hatred was quickly averted in the ensuing discussion. Instead, Mr. Hannity and Sheriff David Clarke blamed … Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Or, something like that.

To go by the doctrine of Cultural Marxism, looting in Florida and elsewhere is black because blacks are locked-out of American institutions. Never mind that the black agenda (perspective and attendant claims) is echoed throughout the culture (in music, art and film), transmitted by the education system (at primary, secondary and tertiary levels); is repeated by most media, most think tanks, by the publishing industry and by public administration. Why, Sen. Tim Scott, a black Republican, has just read President Trump the riot act over the president’s comments following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways. …